ROCK MUSIC Captions by Catherine de Chalain. Edited by Glenna Casalme. www.able.co.nz Captions were made possible with funding from NZ On Air. Copyright Able 2016 Hello, and welcome to Rural Delivery. The wine industry has been experiencing a boom in recent years, and a growing number of innovators are developing better tools for industry use. This week, we look at addressing waste and reducing environmental impacts in the viniculture industry by FMR Group engineers. We visit Kumanu Lamb, where they're aiming to set the standard in animal and staff welfare, food quality and the environment. And we learn how AGMARDT has been helping to create a market for Kiwigarden's freeze-dried snacks for kids. The Clifford family of FMR Group in Blenheim developed and commercialised the R-Series vineyard sprayers with design that cuts spray drift and reduces chemical use by about 30%. In 2010, FMR Group won the Marlborough Environmental Awards' Green Champion Award for environmental and sustainable equipment. FMR Group was originally founded by my father. So it's a two-generation business. He started out as an apprentice mechanic, then he went on to build his own mechanical business. Along the way, he added a couple of tractor franchises, eventually selling them off and retaining the machinery side of the business. In 2001, we began to focus on the viticultural markets. We looked at importing some key products from European partners and in the ensuing years built up a product portfolio that was based around viticulture. In the later 2000s, we saw an opening in the industry for innovative products that were designed and built to handle the NZ and Australasian conditions, which is where we began the manufacturing of the sprayers which we see today. Typically, there's been two-row viticulture sprayers around for some time, both in NZ and in other wine-growing regions. In the early part of the season particularly, um, you're spraying a very small target. Um, it is difficult to get the spray that you're putting out to adhere to that target. Therefore, there's a lot of wastage, um, that obviously ends up in the form of airborne drift and losses to the ground. The three advantages to the FMR R-Series would be the financial advantages from saving the chemical, the environmental advantages from the loss of drift to the ground and airborne, and then the social advantage from your neighbours not receiving the drift. Original idea ` FMR was building conventional vine sprayers, and in discussions with vineyard owners and operators, we really thought, 'There's gotta be a better way.' We worked closely with a particular couple of growers and came up with a lot of different ideas around it. Looked around at what was available in` around the globe, and couldn't find anything, really, that was gonna do the job, so we started working on adapting our current sprayer down the recycling route. The main working area is right where I'm standing here, and usually there would be a grape row. So we're spraying from both sides. Um, nozzles here and here, with fan assist. Um, so what we do is we're` we're blowing from here and from here, and the suction is on the opposite side, so what we're creating is a vortex in the centre of the vine, and the droplets that don't hit the target, the grapevine, go through and into the shroud, run down and through the filter here, and get sucked back to a tank, go through another filtration system. From the success of the two-row tow-behind model and the demand from customers to then multifunction their harvesters, we developed the three-row R-Series sprayer. The fact that they can use what used to be a piece of machinery that parked in the shed 11 months of the year, they can now get out, put the sprayer on its back and do a season with that. The reason to go to three was due to costs in running a more expensive machine. Um, in the two-row version, it stacked up toe to toe with, uh, what we'd say a $50,000 tractor. In the` To pull a harvester out of the shed that was worth, sort of, four times as much as that, the figures needed to stack up to justify u` justify using a machine of that cost. The fact of the recycling side of it has gotta be great, especially in the sustainability side of things. You're recapturing that spray and reusing it. In a three-row form you can cover a lot of ground in a day, and that's very important to bigger customers that are doing a bigger area. The feedback from the market has been very very good. We are constantly being told from our clients the amount of money they are saving in each season, the fact that they are spraying in a lot stronger winds than they have been historically able to, and that they're getting very good comments from any neighbouring houses. Mainly the viticulture industry has been the target. There have been some units sold and used successfully in the blackcurrant industry. Also, there are other potential markets, but the units would need to be adapted to suit them. The sprayers, on average, save between 20% and 40% of a grape grower's annual expenditure. This, in cold hard cash, equates to anywhere from as low as maybe $10,000 for a smaller grower and up to as high as $40,000 to $50,000 saving for a large-scale grower in a one-growing season. When we return, we go to Havelock, where a group of farmers have joined forces to raise the bar for lamb production. ROCK MUSIC Welcome back. Marlborough sheep-and-beef farmers Paul and Muff Newton produce Kumanu lamb on their Havelock farm. 20 farmers make up the Kumanu Group, which is based around four guiding principles ` animal welfare, environmental responsibility, social responsibility and lamb quality and food safety. The home property here is 800 hectares ` 20% flats, 80% steep hill country. Traditionally run around 4500 Romney ewes. We're back a wee bit on that now, as the tailing percentages have lifted quite dramatically in the last year or two. We run Angus cows on the hills. We usually got around 100 to 120 cows, and we've taken on some leases down the valley, so we've been finishing the cattle in recent years. We have got a favourable climate, really, I suppose, you could have to say ` the 60-inch rainfall. The property's got a great history fertiliser-wise. We've been here 18 years, but before that Albie Higgins put a lot of lime on over the years and kept the phosphate levels up, and this country just doesn't operate without that, really. Chris Mulvaney came up with the idea, I think, originally, and he was running StockCARE, or Sheep for Profit, as it was in those days. That was something I got into because I was really keen to find some way of being able to monitor and record some of the information on the stock, and it just seemed like the ideal way to be doing it. So I must have been in that for a year or two when we got to a meeting down in Christchurch. He suggested that because we're doing so much monitoring and so on, that maybe we've got something we can market as far as the lambs go. Well, the bottom line for me ` and I guess for the others that got involved ` is really, we just wanna make more money from our lambs. Three seasons now we've been killing them, and it's been with ANZCO, and ANZCO came up with a distributor in Holland, who's been taking all of our lambs until now. We're simply doing more recording and more monitoring of our stock than is generally done with sheep. As a result, we can sort of guarantee the animal welfare, which is one of the main things for the customers. And the other thing is we've got the, um` quite a lot of protocols with the lambs as far as, uh, how we` how we treat them and, uh, what they've gotta be eating and things like how many times they've gotta go through the yards before they actually go on the truck. And all this is related to the` um, to the taste side of the whole thing, so we produce a good product. The supplier over in Holland wants more product than what we can supply. We just have to say what we can guarantee, because he needs to be able to guarantee his customers. So we're limited at the moment in that regard, but, no, not everybody wants to go to the extent that we are, and not everybody wants to invest those dollars to start with. But for a lot of people that just can see that every year, the schedule's dictating where they're at, and to be able to perhaps get in a position where they can have fixed price and be better off, well,... it's gotta be the right thing to do. Kumanu Lamb ` we're part of StockCARE. You've gotta be a StockCARE farmer before you can have Kumanu Lambs. It's basically about really good data collection ` recording, monitoring and measuring, because, as you know, you can't manage without measuring. With the information, we` we know, and Paul knows, where exactly they are, um, in the business. And they make decisions with confidence. And we look at production systems. We look at the ewe flock production system, the beef cow system, lamb finishing system, beef finishing system. We do benchmarking with other properties, and then we analyse annual results. We can see what's happening from year to year on the property. You ask most farmers, 'How do you judge your performance?' And it's often scanning percentage or lambing percentage, but really, you don't sell a lambing percentage; you're selling kilograms of lamb or kilograms of calf. And we are measuring that, and there we look at the drivers for that. If we find that we're not up to, um, scratch, we're not set` we're not meeting the targets we've met, we go` we` Because we've got so much data, we can look back and see what's gone wrong, and, um, we'll put in place a plan for the next` next` next year to make sure it doesn't happen again. It's not an awful lot of extra work. It's a little bit they do when they're doing everything else. At no time does he have to get them in to condition score or weigh just for that. There are set times. You want to know what's happening pre-mating and then at mating and ram removal. Now, you're always handling those stock at that time, so it's just a thing you do. Yeah, it may add an hour or two to those days, but the information that they glean from it is just huge. The value with` with StockCARE, we were showing a huge improvement in performance on a lot of these properties, but at the end of the day they weren't making any more money out of their lambs. So the Kumanu thing was, um` was a spin-off from that to add value to the final product. Paul` Paul had a whole lot of lambs going off here that were just going into the great big melting pot. He wasn't getting any premium over anyone else. Now he is, and, um, it's` that's` that gives him a real kick, I think. Early on when the committee got together, it was decided that there would be four legs of the table. The first one was animal welfare, next one was environmental, and social and safety` food safety. So as far as animal welfare goes, that's pretty well-covered with the monitoring we're doing and with the vet's supervision all the time on what we're doing, so that's no problem. As far as the environmental ` it was decided that Beef and Lamb put a lot of work into their LEPs ` their land and environmental plans ` so we went with them and we go through to the second stage. That's the minimum of the` of a Beef and Lamb environmental plan. It's a requirement for producing these Kumanus. And the other thing is the social side of things. And the guys are just recording what's happening on their properties. What we're trying to maintain is a pH level that's low, to` It's now pretty well-established and well-known that it affects the quality of the meat and its` how long it can last on the shelf when it's been chilled. So, yeah, really important that we keep the pH levels down, and one of those ways we do that is there's no dogs in the yards. And it applies to ANZCO as well. I mean, when they're` when the trucks come into ANZCO, they're not even allowed to take their dogs into the actual` um, the works, so it's well known that, you know, it's only gonna upset things more. Obviously we gotta bring` use dogs to bring the, uh, sheep into here, but we do that with all due care. Once they're in the yards, um, it's reasonably simple. The financial gain is the most important thing. That comes not through just selling through Kumanu but also the gain in production that we're getting by being part of StockCARE. So what we've been doing with all the development we've been doing and monitoring and recording everything, we're able to see where we're at and see where we improve. And, you know, we've seen marked increase in production over the last number of years. Yeah, we've` And it's all graphed there. It's all on display for us to sorta` We can be assured that what we're doing is sending us in the right direction to increase production. We'll be back soon to meet the couple behind Kiwigarden, producing freeze-dried fruit-and-veg snacks for kids. ROCK MUSIC Hello again. Kiwigarden directors Taine Randell and Joanne Edwards produce freeze-dried snacks for kids. They were able to fast-forward the development of their business into Asia with a grant from AGMARDT. AGMARDT is an independent trust set up by the government. It invests in programmes exploring market opportunities, innovative ideas, and developing future leaders within the agribusiness sector. We live in Hawke's Bay, and it was really interesting for us when we came back from the UK that we're in this fantastic place ` fruit bowl of NZ, grew everything ` but at various times you need snacks for kids that are convenient. Because we freeze-dry, we get our shelf life from that process. We take the water out, but we leave all the bioactives ` all the goodies in there ` and, you know, they're nice little crunchy things and they taste really good. My father owns the freeze-drying facility over the road, and he had made that accessible, and we'd tried these particular products with them, and the kids loved them. And that was how it all began. The whole range reflects our philosophy around 'no nasties'. So we wanted something that had a really clean label that parents and people that are health conscious can look at the back of it; they understand what those things are; there's nothing complicated in there. It's just real food without the water. This is a real slice of apple, and when you look at the back of the ingredient pouch, it's actually just crunchy Hawke's Bay apples. That's all we've got in there. It's like you sliced it up. Our technology enables us to leave it sliced without browning, so that is one of the benefits of our drying technology is that we don't have to add the preservatives; it just removes the water, which helps us to preserve it. Our children were really the development team, because depending on what they liked and what they didn't like was pretty much what went through, and I think that was reflected, actually, with some of the market` the market feedback we got. Our technology, we've developed around yoghurt drops for several reasons. Obviously we've had to look at NZ's competencies when looking to export, and our dairy industry is obviously a pillar of that, internationally. And also, along with our philosophy about good, nutritious food, yoghurt is a good go-to for children. We like the concept around the probiotics. Uh, we also liked the high` naturally high protein and, um, went from there. We're here in what we call the pre-production room. The first step is we actually bring in our base ` just natural yoghurt that's contract-made for us ` and then we throw in our gold kiwifruit puree. That makes our flavoured yoghurt. And then from there we get some little droplets and we freeze them. So we snap in all the goodness, and then at that stage, they're ready to go into our freeze-driers. It's a continuous freeze-drier. So unlike other freeze-driers which you open` It's like an oven, you know ` you close the door and then, bing! Our guys have managed to come up with a pretty nifty little bit of technology where we can just pour the stuff at the top; it comes out the bottom. It's a very very gentle form of drying, and it leaves most of the volatiles, which is the flavours and the smell and all the enzymes, all the goodness. Because this process is done so softly, all those goodies are left intact. One of the difficulties we had at the start, especially in NZ, was no one had really heard of freeze-dried snacks. Certainly the process is not very well-known. So a big part of our getting the brand out there was actually going and` not exactly forcing it down people's throats, but doing a lot of demos, attending a lot of food shows in NZ, a lot of promotional stuff and, as much as anything, just getting people to try it. Once they have, it's certainly been very effective. In the first couple of years, until we got our capacity up, we had a lot of orders, but we couldn't produce enough. So now it's 90%` we're export-focused. Main market is China. Just below that we're really well-established in Singapore and Hong Kong. So things are going well there, but at the same time we're very conscious that our shop window is NZ. We are pretty happy with how we're going in NZ as well ` that there are two main supermarkets being customers for us. AGMARDT were good, because at the time, we needed to get offshore to get our volumes up, and they would help us with market research, assisting with the trade shows over there, and then further on down the line when we needed to expand, they were able to help us with a wee bit of infrastructure. 'So AGMARDT is a charitable trust, and it was set up by the government in 1987.' It came about from the wind-up of the British and NZ Phosphate Commissions, and the funds that were returned ` which were around about $32 million ` to the government, they chose to put that money into a charitable trust for the benefit of agriculture, horticultural and forestry interests. So as far as Kiwigarden is concerned, we are in the in-market space, and we are looking to seed-fund innovative up-and-coming companies that have got some potential to grow. The trustees certainly thought that this had some real good pluses, so the investment is on the grounds that we seed-fund the money so that they can develop marketing programmes, get to understand and integrate with their customers in China, in this situation. It's very independent, so we can make within our` within the limits of our trustee, we can make our own decisions of where we put our funding, and currently it's based on our three strategic pillars. We work in conjunction with other funding agencies such as Callaghan's, NZTE ` we get a lot of referrals from them. So because our funding individually is not large amounts of money, um, we try and` we try and ensure that we` we work with those other funding agencies, so` But we do` We focus on areas that they can't do. The process that's involved in the AGMARDT grant with Kiwigarden is that they have a contract; they have to meet certain milestones. And as they are met from their marketing programmes, then we get an official report, and that's how we fund them ` based on those achievements. Not everything goes right for all of the various grants we do, but it's our means of actually keeping track of how things are proceeding. It's a growth story. We like the growth stories, and if you look at what has been happening in the factory as we've walked around, they've taken a product at $3 a kilo, being milk powder, turned it into something that's worth about $45 a kilo. The added value is what we're looking for, and that's a really good success story for a NZ company. I think anyone who starts a business` You know, the stresses involved, the wolves at the door. And the other thing was my wife and myself, our background's not kids' snack foods. So the FMCG business in NZ ` no idea. Exporting ` you know, w` no idea. So, um, we've gone into it big wide eyes, but it's been` it has been really interesting. The people we've met` And also, it makes you actually realise, in NZ we have got very good manufacturers. NZ's a very` being like it is, it's pretty tough domestically, just cos of the scale. But, um, yeah, it's been really good meeting people. Cos if you do make it in NZ, you certainly can make it` you know, what we've found as well ` the offshore thing's pretty good too. For more information on these and other stories, visit our website, which you can get to via... You can also watch this or previous episodes you missed on TVNZ OnDemand. Next week, we speak with Marlborough farmer Doug Avery about his very personal experience in learning how to farm successfully in his dryland environment. We also learn how that experience opened up a new venture for Doug, helping to build resilient farmers around the country. And we find out about work underway at Plant and Food Research that could bring about a revolution in pipfruit orchard management. Thanks for watching. We hope to see you again next time. Captions by Catherine de Chalain. Edited by Glenna Casalme. www.able.co.nz Captions were made possible with funding from NZ On Air. Copyright Able 2016